When life scuttles your plans, you’ll wish you had planned better.
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8am every Saturday morning. That’s the goal.
Except when you get back from a week in Bali and you’re bed-bound for around 48 hours with an upper respiratory infection that isn’t COVID.
That’ll throw off your routine a little.
I’m still quite unwell — and I have a booked-out workshop tomorrow (Sunday) so this is a very quick newsletter while I’m feeling lucid enough to write at my desk.
Let’s go!
The best plans will come under pressure when life happens. 🥴
Anyone who’s seen my scary calendar and content posting schedule thinks I’m crazy.
But it’s not like I don’t have help. All the regular things that are scheduled in my week are placed in my calendar by an AI system called Motion.
And I spent two days over the Christmas/New Year break planning everything that I would write about in my social media and newsletter.
So while it looks like chaos, it’s actually Marie Kondo-level organisation on a Google Calendar. But life has a way of scuttling all your plans and throwing them in the gutter.
That’s what happened when I got home at 4am on Friday morning from a pleasant break in Bali.
I felt the breathing getting laboured and started experiencing the cough on my way from the hills back to Seminyak. My first thought was COVID. I’ve had it a couple of times already so I know the feeling well.
But the tests were negative. So I’m just unwell.
The flight home was harsh, but it got worse when I got home. Yesterday was awful. Today is a little better, so I’m on the mend, But the result?
Motion is working hard to cram in all my work to today and tomorrow since Monday and Tuesday are already jam-packed.
This is going to be fun.
We plan to get things done, but we don’t plan for the unexpected. 🤦🏾
A woman I worked with at my last employer was, like me, a chronic over-worker. From the outside, she would arrive in the office at 10am, then leave at 2pm.
Not exactly the pattern of an over-worker.
Until one night when you’re working until 1 am and you send her an email that gets immediately answered.
You see, she’s a working Mum. The best kind of organiser there is.
At the time she had a 4 year old boy and a 1 year old bub. She basically worked her life as a Mum first, then made things work for her job around that.
Sometimes when the bub would refuse to sleep at 1 am, it meant she was answering emails.
But one thing she showed me in her calendar that I still yet to add to mine, is two hours of “reactive time.”
This is time to attend to the stuff that swings into your day like a wrecking ball and has to be dealt with there and then.
I really need to add in reactive time to my calendar. Actually, I just did it now while I’m thinking about it. But I’ll start with one hour a day from Monday — even though there isn’t an hour left in any day next week.
It’s the thought that counts, right?
Filling up your calendar with some flexibility. 🧘🏿
It’s taken me a long time to get my scheduling right.
I’ve used a tonne of different tools to get to this point. But I seem to have landed on a few that are working best for me.
And the reason I use systems is that I can’t organise myself. I am a terrible manager of myself and others.
So while my Google Calendar looks like a dog’s breakfast, I have a few ways to make it work better for me, rather than just overloading me with things I can’t do.
Calendly is how I get people to schedule meetings with me. Sometimes it feels obnoxious to say, “hey there — just pick a time in mty calendar linked below.” But honestly without Calendly or something like it (like SendinBlue Meetings or Hubspot Meetings or the 100 other booking tools out there,) I’d be going back and forth with someone five or six times before we found a gap in both our calendars.
As I mentioned earlier, Motion has become a must-have for me. It takes all the repeating tasks I have and schedules them into the best possible times for me, around the things that have already been booked. It took me a couple of weeks to integrate it into what I do, now I don’t know how I ever coped without it. I’m getting more done in less time now, and I am maintaining focus better too.
Once I have a place to schedule all my recurring tasks and another place to get people to book time with me, it’s much easier to then get things done — even when my upper respiratory system decides to be uncooperative.
Life is going to happen whether you like it or not. So be prepared. ⏰
The takeaways this week are pretty simple.
- Life is going to mess with your schedule (those with kids know exactly what I’m talking about!)
- If you don’t plan for unexpected things to happen, you’ll be caught in a scheduling mess like I am today.
- There are tools you can use to smooth out the rollercoaster ride a bit, as long as you allow for “reactive time” like my former coworker did.
That’s all for this weekend. Just one short read about preparing for when life is going to take a wrecking ball to your schedule.
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